Amy Clarke

Similarly, public surplus sales are fantastic and sometimes include auctions as well. Look for your nearest places on publicsurplus.com, and they might have brick-and-mortar storefronts for stuff too cheap to be worth auctioning.

If you love the down but not the shell, transplanting it into a new shell would be the easiest fix. It wouldn't be impossible to sew your own shell, but a good shell will have baffles between the areas where the down sits, and those are fiddly and annoying to sew correctly. Of course, if you don't care about baffles, then quilting the down between each pair of pattern pieces would be pretty straightforward even by hand or on a domestic sewing machine.

Personally I'd thrift or yard sale a nice shell that's lost its down, then vacuum all the down out of the old one and make the world's fanciest pet bed or something. Give your new shell a good wash while it's empty -- you can use much more heat and stronger soap than you would when it has down in it. Then I'd figure out how to transfer the down from old to new... I'd have to go down the youtube hole and watch other people filling down items to get a clue how to do that at home.

Rule of thumb when opening up something you'll want to reassemble later, like a new shell, is that you only ever cut the stitching threads, never the fabric itself. A seam ripper is the correct tool for this job; tiny scissors also work.

If you're reusing the down into something quilted, I'd strongly recommend considering a flat-lining approach -- cut the lining and outer for each pattern piece, sew them together right-sides-out right along where you'll later put the seams to assemble the garment, put the down in, close the hole you put the down in through, fluff it to distribute the down evenly (like the world's flattest and funniest-shaped pillow), then quilt the whole thing to keep the down in place. Then you'll basically have a bunch of little separate quilts shaped like the pieces of the coat you're trying to make, and there will be down where you need it but no down making the actual seam bulky when you assemble the final thing. If you want to get really fancy you could french seam the edges of each piece before putting the down in, but that's overkill when you could just put bias tape over the raw seam allowances after assembling the final garment, or use a serger if you have one.

Big difference between "don't show plastic" and "it never touched plastic".

If you had harvested/processed the meat yourself, how would you have packaged it to store between when you acquired it and when you started recording the BB?

Could you swap that harvest/processing step with a "buy at the store" step, and otherwise do as you would without plastic?

When we harvest meat for reals, each cut starts out bare on a wooden cutting board before we package it for storage or prepare it to eat. You could start your meat the same way at the start of the BB, regardless of whether it had plastic involved in its past.

If you want to exert a lot of force on roots and stuff, I think you might be happiest with a broadfork. Pitchforks and bedding forks (which are the only Ames fork products that I'm seeing online at the moment) are way too flimsy to dig with. Spading forks... I guess some people like them, but I've never had much use for them; I find them a rather unhappy medium between a shovel and a broadfork. Broadforks let you use leverage to pull the tines, which are almost more like individual blades, through the soil. The broadfork is my go-to for getting dense clay loosened up enough to pull out the roots of things I'd rather not have in a particular garden bed.


also, fun fact, if you broadfork underneath a blackberry crown, it often lifts right out of the soil afterwards!

Depends on how happy you are to be cutting metal.

If you'd like to leave it intact, it's good storage for potable water, or for any dry goods that you want to keep everything out of. If storing dry goods, pull out the tube thingy that goes down the middle on the inside.

If you'd like to cut it up, then it can make a good pot, or it can make a good trough when cut the other way.

A metal keg is an interesting combo of light, strong, perfect-ish cylinder, and UV-proof. If you wanted to crush dried biomass in the garden, rolling a keg back and forth over it would do the job. If you need an extra seat, adding something to the top of a keg will give a portable and almost indestructible result.

If you ever set up temporary structures like tents or canopies and need to prevent them from blowing away, a keg full of water would make a great ballast. The handles are easy to tie ropes to, and you can transport the keg empty then fill it on-site. Sure, plastic jugs can do the same job, but steel is prettier.

And with any big piece of steel like that, I'd hang it from a string and whack it with a stick and see if I like the noise it makes. Might be able to cut the bottom out (or cut the top off and invert it) to get a lovely gong or bell, if the metal's right. Could probably hammer it out into a steel drum type instrument too, if you wanted.

The basics of your idea are almost exactly the plan that my aunt and uncle executed back in the '00s, living in Idaho and developing the Oregon place where I'm living now. They weren't into the permaculture thing per se, and they had the complexities of logging it first, but similar basic idea.

They had a cute old Airstream trailer for the temporary residence, but ended up selling it. If they hadn't, I would have put a roof over it and kept it as guest quarters.

Digging the well took 2 tries for them, which cost much more than they anticipated.

You can arbitrage money vs time and speedrun to rain catchment with a cheap steel carport.

Arrange your tasks so you will have dug some holes in the ground before you go in with an excavator. It's good to know what you're actually digging into and whether there are any special concerns to dealing with it, or special uses for it. It'd suck to, for instance, discard a clay layer to put your driveway in and then later realize you wanted that clay to line a pond with. Not the end of the world, as you can get more from future earthworks, but planning ahead can maximize the potential to stack functions. This might happen organically if you dig an outhouse in your early camping visits.

If you can find a good deal on a singlewide manufactured, a tiny home, or even a large prefab shed with delivery, that may out-compete the RV option.

If you're going to be away from the site for weeks to months at a time while you've got valuable things there, consider security. An old shipping container can be a decent option for lockable storage. A camera system may or may not be desirable. Being on good terms with the neighbors, very important. It worked for my aunt and uncle in part because my parents are on the adjoining property and were happy to walk over and check on things once in awhile.

By rural social norms, at least out here, land that's not owned by anyone who bothers to keep trespassers off becomes semi-public by default, and falls into semi-public use.

I drink from the well, but irrigate with rain. It's basically time travel -- the water ends up on the same watershed as it would have without me, but I change when it arrives.

welcome to the forum, and congratulations on the new orchard!

It took me a long time to fully appreciate it, but in gardening, the first place you try a plant doesn't have to be the last place it ends up.

The best way to find out what works on your site is to try it. If a plant hates where it's at, it'll generally sulk for awhile before dying. If you want to spoil and baby a plant by moving it, when you're early days in things, you're allowed to do that. And everything you're growing will set seed.

Consider framing your goal as "establish enough of these plants that they'll add seeds to the garden's seed bank". You can give them a bit of help by spreading seeds around in the fall to make sure they end up in places you think the plants might like, but then the best way to get plants at the spacing your particular site wants is to let them decide where they want to be. Make sure you know what babies of each of your introduced plants look like, so that you don't pull them when weeding.

"weeding", as a practice of adjusting which plants are at an advantage and which are at a disadvantage relative to others, is one of your most powerful non-chemical tools in shaping the ecosystem toward your preferences.

So to answer your actual question, no, you're probably fine with everything crammed in like that for several years, while the fruit trees grow up. By the time the trees get big enough for light directly under them to be an issue, all your lower story plants should be mature enough to set seed every year, and you should already have little volunteers coming up wherever they like throughout your garden. Those volunteers are better plants than the introduced parents -- they're the results of rolling a bunch of genetic dice for the reproduction process and starting your own custom landrace of each plant, optimized for your conditions in particular. Among the volunteers, if you have one that performs poorly by your standards you can hurry things along by removing it, and if you have one that you particularly like, you can hurry things along by cloning it or going to extra effort to cultivate its particular seeds.

I lost a couple years of tomatoes to persistent herbicides in what was supposed to be good compost... lesson learned! These days I've got a nice equilibrium with the chickens making the compost for me, though.

The boring answer is that I do, and they're currently invested in index funds to keep growing over time. But to capture the intent, I'll answer it as "what would you buy if you had a $200 / $1000 reimbursement for new purchases" :)

$200 covers good roofing for a 10x10 shed, or 4 cases of #10 cans of wheat at the LDS store. That's around 100 days of calories if you can scrounge some water and fire to cook them with, which my existing systems make pretty easy. Caloric shortfall is the gap between my current gardening and real self-sufficiency.

$1000 is right around the price of a thousand-gallon water tank. More rain storage, more better!